In the study of literature and the conversation about how it is interpreted, there is always the question of the reader's context. How a person reads a text is effected by her experiences, her viewpoint, her beliefs, even her immediate moods and emotions at the time of reading.
Visual and performance artist Amir Baradaran explores this subject in an absolutely fascinating way.
As if Marina Abramović's current exhibit/performance, The Artist is Present at MoMA weren't fascinating enough, Baradaran brought a performance of his own into the exhibit a few days after its opening. His performance, titled The Other Artist is Present highlights the perception of the audience by altering their experience. From the explanation of the piece on Baradaran's website:
"No doubt, certain patrons will recall the mysterious man upon entering the atrium and witnessing Abramovic’s piece, thus shaping their experience of what was once an unrelated work. By joining itself to the Balkan artist’s performance, Baradaran’s reactive piece has left an indelible mark- impacting and altering the perception and memories of the viewer."
View Amir Baradaran's four act performance The Other Artist is Present
More about about Marina Abramović and The Artist is Present:
Wikipedia
New York Times
The Artist is Present at MoMA
The Marina Film Project
In a recent class we were discussing the best way to read a text, specifically one written two thousand years ago. In no time at all the conversation developed into one giant sex metaphor and stubbornly remained there for the rest of the class.
There is, of course, no pure way to read any text, especially one this far out of our own context. We must, therefore, attempt to penetrate the text in order to discover its meaning. Upon penetration we may further be able to procreate, developing a new text out of the meaning we extract.
What problems does this metaphor bring to the reading of a text? For one, the penetration metaphor specifically implies that the submissive partner, the text is feminine and the active, dominant partner, the reader is masculine. The implications of this are an entirely separate conversation, so I will simply point out that this metaphor can easily be feminized by the reader simply attempting to wrap her mind around the text.
The second, and I think most fully problematic implication of the metaphor asks whether all this penetration and procreation is appropriate. Are we in fact violating the purity of the text through our penetration of it? Plagiarism has long been metaphorically associated with rape (see the work of Rebecca M. Howard). This metaphor comes from the historical sense of rape as the theft of a possession (specifically that of a husband or father - again, another conversation completely). So does the reading of a text fit into a rape metaphor? Is the formulation of idea, the speculation of motive, the dissection of language all inappropriate use, indeed violation of a text?
I have to agree with one of the other graduate students in class who pointed out the difference between rape and not is consent. She argued that the penetration of the text would be inappropriate if it were not indeed consensual. However, isn't the very act of publishing a work offering it up for interpretation and yes, penetration by others? At the risk of further encouraging this metaphor, I can only conclude that text and reader do in fact have a mutual sexual relationship.
